" The Amazing Period " The First Gentleman : The

Story of the Regent, afterwa'rds George IV. By Graco E. Thompson. (Jonathan Cape. 1.2s. 6d.)

Ix her introduction the author of this book announces that she has taken the eighteenth century " conversation piece" as her model, and that she has gone to Mr. Creevey, Lady

Charlotte Campbell, and Horice -Walpole for her material " With Conversation Pieces, borrowed from these and others; it is possible, I think, to arrange a gallery of portraits, of Georgd and his friends, of Caroline and Charlotte, of Fox and Duchess Georgians, of Creevey and `_our Buffram,' of the King and the People of England during that amazing period which began in 1772 and ended a hundred years ego."

She has succeeded admirably, and her choice of method is a very happy one. Nothing could portray one aspect of the

regency and reign of George IV better than this mosaic which Miss Thompson has so ingeniously puLtogether out of the letters and diaries of the wits and gossips of-the time. Miss Thompson is not concerned with the fundamental problems of the time (she announces that she has chosen to imitate Horace Walpole rather than Macaulay in her approach to

history), but she has done what she set out to do, and given us a very fine picture of its manners. Miss Thompson has, of course, been singularly fortunate in her material ; for the " Chronique Scandaleuse " of the career of George IV has been told in the words of some of the most brilliant scandal.

mongers who have ever lived. Horace Walpole lived long enough to commit to paper his account of George's first youth; and Mr. Creevey was on hand to entrust to his diary his version of his conduct in his mature years. And there are a host of minor witnesses besides, who lacked neither malice nor the gift of expression. But Miss Thompson deserves

great credit for the way in which she has selected and arranged this material. She has ransacked all the social history of the time, and has taken from them just those excerpts which give us a most vivid sense of the scene ; she has linked them together with a connecting tissue of narrative and of com- mentary which (except for her rather inordinate sympathy with George HI) is extremely lucid and astute.

It was, as Miss Thompson has stated, " an amazing period," and one of its most astonishing figures was the Prince Regent. His career, illumined by the bitter insight of his contempor-

aries' anecdotes and epigrams, emerges from Miss Thompson's pages like some preposterous and vulgar extravaganza. It

begins with his childhood, passed amidst the dreadful monotony of his parents' court, from which he eventually escaped and " came upon the town with a new shoe-buckle and the seduction of a maid-of-honour." His amours, his friendships,

his political intrigues and his marriages, are all related. We . see him surrounded by a host of figures—Fox and Sheridan

and Beau Brummel, his various mistresses and his two wives, Mrs. FitzHerbert and the unfortunate Caroline of Brunswick. The scenes succeed each other with a rapidity that is not unlike the cinema, from the secret marriage to Mrs. Fitz- Herbert to the official marriage with Caroline of Brunswick, forced upon George by the King and Parliament. Hogarth should have painted the wedding, where the Prince " came so drunk that the Dukes of Roxburgh and Bedford had to hold him up," with Lady Jersey, the maitresse en titre'," presiding at the wedding-feast The picture of the bride, the luckless Caroline, is perhaps

the most moving part of the book. The squalid story of the separation forced upon her by the Prince after the birth of their daughter, and of the intrigues,- the dissensions and the scandals which followed it, culminating in the famous trial are all retold in a vigorous and piquant way.

The King's attempt to divorce Queen Caroline failed, but was inextricably intermingled with the political passions

of the day. The Queen became the heroine of the people, the symbolic victim of tyrannous oppression. She, however.

threatened to become an embarrassment to her defenders, as the well-known verses of the day indicate :—

" Gracious Queen, we thee implore Go away and sin no more. Or if that effort be too great, Go away at any rate ! '

ghe did not " go away," but stayed to assert her right

to be crowned as Queen at the Coronation of George IV, to be turned back from the door of Westminster Abbey, to die

suddenly, and for the King opportunely, saying to Brougham who had defended her at her trial, " I am going to die, Mr. Brougham, but it does not signify." She was given in death the honours refused her in life. Her funeral was made the

occasion for an unprecedented popular demonstration.

Ile King- 9AltiiVed jeers conS91.0.. J .imam Y

including the theory that he had played a decisive part in the battle of Waterloo. When death came he was apparently quite unaware of it. " He slept, and woke again in the early hours of a June morning With a scream : Oh God ! they have deceived me. - This is death.' -" Rehlity had intruded brutally and finally on the gross fantasy of his life.